Residents in Colorado Town File Class-Action Lawsuit Against State and Governor to Uphold Fracking Ban

Lafayette, CO residents passed a measure to ban fracking within city limits in November, yet they're still fighting for clean air and water.

A month after elections, the Colorado Oil and Gas Association filed a lawsuit against the City of Lafayette to overturn the newly passed Community Bill of Rights. Now, residents are turning the tables back on the association, as well as the state and Gov. John Hickenlooper in a first-of-its-kind, class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday in Boulder County District Court.

While the suit centers on fracking, it seeks to protect the citizens' right to self-governance under the Community Bill of Rights. The residents allege that theColorado Oil and Gas Act and the industry’s enforcement of it violate that right to local self-government under the U.S. Constitution.

Residents in Lafayette, CO are fighting to uphold the fracking ban they approved in November under the Community Bill of Rights.

“This class action lawsuit is merely the first of many by people across the United States whose constitutional rights to govern their own communities are routinely violated by state governments working in concert with the corporations that they ostensibly regulate," said Thomas Linzey, Esq., executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which helped craft Lafayette's Community Bill of Rights.

"The people of Lafayette will not stand idly by as their rights are negotiated away by oil and gas corporations, their state government, and their own municipal government.”

The world's unregarded forests are at risk. Intact forest is now being destroyed at an annual rate that threatens to cancel out any attempts to contain global warming by controlling greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study.

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"We need new solutions in managing water resources so as to meet emerging challenges to water security caused by population growth and climate change," said Audrey Azoulay, director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in a statement. "If we do nothing, some five billion people will be living in areas with poor access to water by 2050."

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A Hollywood scriptwriter couldn't make this up. One day after new data revealed widespread toxic water contamination near coal ash disposal sites, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt announced a proposal to repeal the very 2015 EPA safeguards that had required this data to be tracked and released in the first place. Clean water is a basic human right that should never be treated as collateral damage on a corporate balance sheet, but that is exactly what is happening.